Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

They splash along the beach until the cliffs fall away, replaced by sand dunes that roll into a hillside choked with rubber-leaved salal and bony manzanita. They find a cedar with a kink of roots hanging over a shallow gully and they settle beneath it to rest.

Lewis looks to Gawea and says, “You came back for me.”

“All this time you’ve been following me. I decided it was time to follow you.”

“We need to find who set off those explosions. Can you help?”

She nods and looks to the sky, where the cloud of gulls spins. At that instant they break apart and spread in every direction.

* * *

The sewage-treatment facility is north of Astoria, on a peninsula that reaches like a mandible across the mouth of the Columbia. There are massive open-air cauldrons, walled in by concrete, with metal walkways reaching across them. This is where they find the sisters, who dip long poles with screened scoops into the sludge beneath them and splat it into one of many five-gallon buckets they have lined up on the walkway. Their rifles are strapped across their broad backs, and when Lewis calls out to them, they drop the poles and quickly arm themselves.

“I’m a friend,” he says.

They do not ask him what he wants, but they do not fire either, when he approaches them with his hands up. The rest of his party remains below. The seagulls whirl overhead and dapple him with shadows.

At the museum, in his office, there was a section of his desk worn smooth and discolored from where he always rested his arm. It was the best kind of polish, shabbied over time, earned. That is what their faces remind him of. The women resemble each other, broad figures, short graying haircuts that look like tweed caps set on their heads. They both wear denim pants, canvas coats. If he didn’t have a rifle pointed at his chest, he might notice more about them, but for now, one is in front, the other in back, and that is what distinguishes them.

“What do you think?” one says.

“Don’t know,” the other says.

“I don’t think he’s one of them.”

“You one of them?”

“No,” Lewis says.

“What about the rest of them. The ones down below?”

“They’re good.”

“They’re good, huh?” The women look at each other. Some sort of unspoken communication seems to pass between them. “I don’t know.”

“Weird,” the other one says. “There’s something weird about you.”

Lewis lowers his hands and they tense their rifles. “We want to help you,” he says.

“Help us?”

“You mean you want to harvest some algae?”

He can’t tell if they’re joking. Everything they say comes across as a gruff bark. “You set off the explosions earlier today?”

“You bet we did.”

“We blew the shit out of them.”

“Well,” Lewis says. “We want to help. We want to join your army.”

The women laugh together, a single mean ha . “Army.”

“No army. Just us.” One of them shoulders her rifle and picks up her pole and returns to skimming the pond, glopping the buckets full.

Lewis says, “There’s no one else.” His words sound defeated, accusatory. He doesn’t know what he imagined, but not this, two women stirring a sewer. He cannot think of anything more to say. He is all out of words. But the second woman, with her rifle now propped on her hip, is staring at him expectantly.

“Why are you harvesting algae?” he says.

“For fuel.”

He looks around as though searching for an explanation.

“For our truck.” She motions with the rifle. “It’s parked right over there.”

“You have a truck?”

“Yeah, it’s right over there,” says the other sister, hoisting up a dripping scoop of sludge.

HIS GUESTS HAVE already arrived, but Thomas remains in the bath. He will make his entrance soon. His costume is a cloak made from the scales of a massive snake speared outside the wall and presented to him by the rangers as a gift. He didn’t care for its rubbery meat, but the treated skin shimmers like jeweled chain mail.

For now, though, he splashes in the tub. There is nothing so pleasing as a hot bath. He immerses his head in the water and the sounds of the world muffle to a dribble and plop. The dust soaks from his skin, his every pore opens and eases the stress from him. He takes the water into his mouth, tasting the soap, tasting himself, and spurts it back out. He likes to pretend sometimes he is an infant, floating in his mother’s belly, not a care in the world, every need served by the larger body hosting him.

He wants his body like an infant’s too, so he asks to be shaved.

Vincent runs the razor along his cheeks, his chest, his belly, his groin. “Make me completely naked,” he says.

The windows are shuttered, blinding the sun and softening the noise outside the Dome. People have been gathering outside his gates the last hour. Their chants storm the air. Their feet stomp and shake the ground. They rattle the fence with their hands. A few, he knows, have climbed over it, only to be struck down by deputies, hacked by machetes.

He chanced a look outside earlier. His grounds are a black cluster of deputies — and the gates beyond a seething throng of people. The sun was high enough then to burn every shadow from the city except the blackness held in their open mouths.

The razor scrapes the top of his thigh. The soap and hair ooze from it when Vincent splashes a handful of water. “Can’t you just kill them?”

Thomas has his arms draped over the lip of the tub, his head pillowed by the rim. The rest of his body floats, suspended by Vincent’s grip. “Who? Who is them? Everyone is them. We can’t kill everyone.” He stares at the ceiling, where steam swirls, as though an atmosphere is forming, as though this room is a world of its own.

The door knocks open and Slade barges through it and Vincent slips his razor and draws a red line across Thomas’s lower belly. “What?” Thomas says at a shriek. “Can’t you see we’re busy?”

Slade pulls a towel off a hook and stands at the foot of the tub with it bunched in one hand. “Get out.”

“I’m not done.”

Slade goes to the windows and rips open the shutters and the sunlight shocks the room. The noise outside — the screaming, the chanting — grows fiercer.

Thomas rises from the tub, not yet shaved entirely, one of his legs hairy, the other pink and clean. He pats himself down with the towel and presses it hard against the razor slash, and the blood petals through the threading of the towel.

“Party’s over,” Slade says. “The gates have been breached.”

The guests are racing up the stairs as they race down. One has jewels encrusting her eyebrows. Another wears a dress of white feathers. Another is painted with swirling gold designs, maybe costumed as a sandstorm. They flail their arms and trip their feet, scurrying past, leaving behind tables stacked high with desserts, a stage empty except for its instruments. Broken glass and broken plates glitter the floor. Thomas wears only a robe, no shoes, and he bloodies his feet on a glass shard and cries out and sits down to nurse it, only to be snatched up by Slade and shoved down a hallway. “Hurry up, you fool.”

The air shakes with footsteps and screams. Thomas gets a glimpse of the rotunda, a mess of deputies bullied back by the tide of people surging forward, not pausing at the machetes that come down on them. They swing bricks and boards and pipes and fists, whatever they might make into a weapon. A glimpse is all he gets. Slade jostles him through a door, the door to the basement, instructing him to escape through the sewer.

“And then what?” Thomas hates the way his voice sounds, like one more broken glass.